BUILT-UP AREA DETECTION BASED ON SUBSPACE PROJECTIONS USING POLARIMETRIC SAR DATA

Abstract. The task of detecting and identifying objects remotely has long been an area of intense interest and active research. Active sensing of objects with radio waves is a whole new domain of target detection which is made available by radar remote sensors. Land cover/use information extraction is one of the most important applications of radar remote sensing, especially in urban areas. In this paper, we take a new look at the built-up area extraction problem in polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data and assume canonical scattering mechanisms as our signal sources which combination of them with appropriate weight fractions formed a scattering vector of each pixel. The set of the scattering mechanisms is divided into two groups: the scattering mechanism of built-up area, and non-objected scattering mechanisms. Then, we describe a technique which simultaneously annihilates the effect of non-objected scattering mechanisms, and detects the presence of a scattering mechanism of interest. The experimental results on several quad-polarimetric datasets show the significant agreement with expected results, while saving computational complexity.